this is my first post. i have a century hearth 1000sq ft. stove. it doesn't heat my house which is less then 1000 sq ft. i ordered magic heat to install to capture some of the heat that is escaping. i've only read great reviews from northern tool. do any of you have experience with magic heat? thanks alot!
magic heat
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Common question. Good reviews mean little unless you know their context. It would be better to figure out why the stove is not heating. It should handle the 1000 sq ft easily. If the issue is wet wood, the magic heat could turn the system into a creosote machine.
Search on magic heat for several threads covering this product. Here's a starter.
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/28532/
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/25022/
Search on magic heat for several threads covering this product. Here's a starter.
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/28532/
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/25022/
is your century unit a "reburn" unit? an epa certified stove? one would think it should heat that space by itself. as stated wet wood may be a factor as reburn units do not usually perform well with wet or unseasoned (green) wood. as for the majic heat , i strongly advise my customer who enquire about them not to use one. the principle is to reclaim heat ordinarily lost up the flue , but if you are having performance issues with your actual stove to start with you may not be achieving temperatures required in your flue to maintain an adequate draft and stay out of the "creosote zone"
a better idea might be to go over your setup with the pro's here and let us see if we can figure out why you arent getting the usual heat output that stove should deliver. century (though they were a competitor of ours) did produce a respectable line of stoves in my opinion very similar in "btu for the buck" to our own units. that said there are several factors which may contribute to the unit's not keeping up with the advertised heat load.
please describe your installation , type of chimney degree of house insulation even the approximate age of the house, is it vynal sided? do you have good windows and such, is the stove hard to get going from a cold start? these answers can offer clues to help determine why you are getting substandard results. personally i do this kind of diagnostic work for a living ,in here i "play" doing the same basic thing when i have a chance for "funsies" as my compatriots do as well. give us some info and let us see if we can solve this before resorting to a device such as this which may be more harm than help.
a better idea might be to go over your setup with the pro's here and let us see if we can figure out why you arent getting the usual heat output that stove should deliver. century (though they were a competitor of ours) did produce a respectable line of stoves in my opinion very similar in "btu for the buck" to our own units. that said there are several factors which may contribute to the unit's not keeping up with the advertised heat load.
please describe your installation , type of chimney degree of house insulation even the approximate age of the house, is it vynal sided? do you have good windows and such, is the stove hard to get going from a cold start? these answers can offer clues to help determine why you are getting substandard results. personally i do this kind of diagnostic work for a living ,in here i "play" doing the same basic thing when i have a chance for "funsies" as my compatriots do as well. give us some info and let us see if we can solve this before resorting to a device such as this which may be more harm than help.
i'm gonna do my best to describe my setup. please bare with me; i'm not too fimiliar with the discriptions. my century hearth 1000sq ft is an epa certified stove (broken link removed to http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/century-hearth-1-000-square-foot-wood-stove). we just bought our house, it was made in the 70's. our chimney is about 6 feet of single wall black pipe and then about 8 feet of the triplewall chimney outside. our house had cedar siding. our windows are new, and pretty well insulated. our hosue holds heat well, but it takes along time to heat up. i fire can be lit for over an hour and the stove will just be warm to the touch, while the singlewalled pipe heats up VERY quickly. that is why i am considering magicheat. it seems like all our heat is going up the chimney.
thanks alot for responding to my post. i just found this site and i love it.
thanks alot for responding to my post. i just found this site and i love it.
It would be helpful to understand how you run the stove for a typical load of wood. Do you close off the air control at all? If so, how much and at what stage of burning?
Before you think about Magic Heat, let's figure out why your stove is just warm to the touch after an hour. My stove would burn my fingers down to stumps if I touched it after an hour.
Do you have a stove top thermometer? If not, get one asap and observe the temps. What is your SOP for loading the stove, setting the air, etc.? Now that w know the system's physical setup, we need to get an idea of what kind of wood you're burning and how it's burning.
Do you have a stove top thermometer? If not, get one asap and observe the temps. What is your SOP for loading the stove, setting the air, etc.? Now that w know the system's physical setup, we need to get an idea of what kind of wood you're burning and how it's burning.
On my stove, if I run the stove with the air open all the way, I get a lot of heat going up the chimney. Once the fire is established, reducing the primary air even by just an inch of travel will cause the stove temps to start to increase and the flue temps to drop.
If your stove is a reburn style with a baffle and burn tubes, make sure that your baffles are setting properly.
When I first got my stove setup, the baffles were not setting in the stove properly. Once I realized the problem and slid the baffles back into place, the stove could work as it was designed to. The difference was night and day.
-SF
If your stove is a reburn style with a baffle and burn tubes, make sure that your baffles are setting properly.
When I first got my stove setup, the baffles were not setting in the stove properly. Once I realized the problem and slid the baffles back into place, the stove could work as it was designed to. The difference was night and day.
-SF
i don't think the draft control on my stove works very well. if i close it all the way or open it all the way, it doesn't seem to make that much of a difference. i can have the air control all the way closed and open the door to the woodstove and no smoke comes in the room at all.
in responce to the guy who asked how i load my stove: i do the normal method for making a fire, i use newspaper, small sticks or pieces of wood until the fire gets going i will add larger pieces.
i have had wood that i split during the summer that i was using that didn't seem dry enough. i have switched to oak that had been sitting for a couple of years, but was not spilt; this wood seems very dry, but it still makes a hissing sound when first put into the stove, do you think this could be from rain that is on it?.
in responce to the guy who asked how i load my stove: i do the normal method for making a fire, i use newspaper, small sticks or pieces of wood until the fire gets going i will add larger pieces.
i have had wood that i split during the summer that i was using that didn't seem dry enough. i have switched to oak that had been sitting for a couple of years, but was not spilt; this wood seems very dry, but it still makes a hissing sound when first put into the stove, do you think this could be from rain that is on it?.
Oak needs to dry a couple years after being split. It sounds like the issue here is unseasoned wood. Damp wood does not heat very well. It'll burn, but at half the temperature the stove is capable of. And it will gunk up the flue with creosote.
Make sure your flue is not already full of creosote first. Then go to the store and pick up a couple bundles of dry firewood and try them out. I think you'll see a big difference.
Make sure your flue is not already full of creosote first. Then go to the store and pick up a couple bundles of dry firewood and try them out. I think you'll see a big difference.
Sounds like you may have some excess air leaking in somewhere. Check your door gasket and also your ash pan gasket if it has one.
i'm gonna go to the store today and get some dry firewood; good suggestion. i hope that there is no creosote; the chimney was just installed this year, and i've only been using it for a month or two. do you think it could already have creosote build up?
Creosote can build up quickly when the conditions are right. Damp wood, cool fires and a cold chimney are the ingredients for condensing creosote. If it were me, I'd check it.
jlore,
put one on my last stove and it helped alot.
might check on the code though...........
dont think it was up to code where i was located but i never had a problem
check if it is U.L. listed as well
rn
put one on my last stove and it helped alot.
might check on the code though...........
dont think it was up to code where i was located but i never had a problem
check if it is U.L. listed as well
rn
That's the stove I have in my workshop. It's a darned good little heater, and oughta get the job done for you. I'd figure out why the stove's not heating before I'd go installing some sort of flue heat exchanger in an attempt to get any more performance out of a non-performing system. There is no ash pan gasket, there's a removable section of firebrick in the firebox floor that allows you to shove ashes down into the drawer. I never use it, I just shovel ashes out the door into a bucket. I figure the small gaps around that removable brick are packed full of ash, so I see no evidence of excess air entering from there. The stove has both primary and secondary combustion air. Only the primary is user-adjustable. When I have a nice fire rolling in that stove, I can shut the primary completely for a good portion of the burn cycle, then start bumping it back open in the later stages. There is an optional blower kit for the stove (I don't have one installed). From everything we know here so far, I'd also have to guess that your wood is the culprit. If you had a door gasket leak or something, then good wood would just burn that much hotter and faster. That stove really should be putting out a good deal of heat for you. Good luck! Rick
With the stove running and the air control set to full closed, go around the edges with a lit candle or a long lighter and see if you're sucking air in through any of the seams.
I agree that something is very wrong here. Checking for leaks and doing a test with known good dry wood is a good place to start the search for an answer. Do you have a thermometer?
I agree that something is very wrong here. Checking for leaks and doing a test with known good dry wood is a good place to start the search for an answer. Do you have a thermometer?
The other thing to check is that the bricks in the baffle are sitting in the correct position above the secondaries. Sometimes they get bumped out of position.
jlore said:
As BG stated....eliminate your wood as the culprit. I am guessing that your ill performing stove will wake up when it is fed some good, dry stove chow.
My opinion is to hold off on the magic creosote maker. As was said previously, if you strap that thing to a system that is not currently running right, you could compound the issue (and danger).
![[Hearth.com] magic heat](/talk/data/attachments/13/13236-3f91c1e8173a200fd3d07cc65943e7aa.jpg?hash=r-bSnWzY0W)
Dow N. Jones said:
Closing in on the end of a burn cycle...see the red glow? A little while before, I couldn't have sat in front of the open door to take a pic. When I get a coal bed like that, I open the primary wide and crack the door...more heat from the stove as it burns to ash, reload whenever I feel like it. Some wood coals diferently than other wood. This is Pine & Juniper. But hey, this thread isn't about my stove, Mr. Jones...try to stay on topic.
Rick![[Hearth.com] magic heat](/talk/data/attachments/13/13283-76805b0f5bf4c05d3352008f9991d35f.jpg?hash=uBFqkR5uGm)
i bought some seasoned alder wood last night at the store and put just 2 small peices in the stove and it heated right up. so my problem is unseasoned wood. some of the wood i have been putting in it is from logs that have been sitting for years, but they were never covered. i don't need magicheat or a blower just good wood. i consider this case closed. thankyou everyone who gave imput.
fossi, i like your brickwork; it looks really nice.
fossi, i like your brickwork; it looks really nice.
hi,
burning for the 1st time this year, I have a century fw240007, kind of small for my house, but cranks out the heat pretty well having a problem maintaining the fire all night, is it possible to make it last more than 5 hours?
also, have aquestion about the fire brick that goes on top of the baffle, in the instructions it looked like the set on top of the baffel but while looking trough the forum I saw a picture of them filling the space between the baffle and the back of the fire box, did I misinterpret of directions?
burning for the 1st time this year, I have a century fw240007, kind of small for my house, but cranks out the heat pretty well having a problem maintaining the fire all night, is it possible to make it last more than 5 hours?
also, have aquestion about the fire brick that goes on top of the baffle, in the instructions it looked like the set on top of the baffel but while looking trough the forum I saw a picture of them filling the space between the baffle and the back of the fire box, did I misinterpret of directions?
The firebricks should sit so there is about a 2" gap in front. This keeps the hot gas and smoke under the baffle longer to ignite the secondary burn.
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